How…how, I ask you, do my fingernails get so darned dirty? It’s not like I dig around in potted plants. I type all day, for heaven’s sake…

The Montreal Pagan community is an odd beast. It eats its young, and displays apathy in most respects except griping and back-biting and, well, being apathetic. Coming into the community at a time where knives were still being sharpened, grudges were being held, and politics were raging, I decided I wanted nothing to do with it and stayed a solitary practitioner until such time as I slowly started to talk to others of like mind, and then, well, it was teaching and working in the local esoteric shop, and opening Canada’s first drop-in Pagan resource centre, teaching, doing interviews on radio and with journalists, more teaching… and somehow, like it or not, I was a public figure, although not of the community. Like others who had no time or patience for histrionics and back-stabbing, I shared with personal friends and kept myself to myself. I dipped a toe into the community with the resource centre, but the commnity bit back so savagely that I withdrew. When generousity of energy and effort is rebuffed so often, you learn your lesson. (Fortunately, the centre still functions, due to the enthusiasm of several volunteers, whom I pray do not burn out community-wise, as I did.) So I kept myself to myself.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday was one of those odd coincidences that you can’t wriggle out of. I make it a point to tell as many people as I can about the city’s public rituals so they can get an idea of a variety of traditions and meet other people involved in this path. So when I told my students two weeks ago, they became quite excited, until we realised that our weekly class would overlap with the ritual. “Oh, well,” I said, “never mind. Sorry.”

And then one of them said, “Well, couldn’t we all go together? Like a field trip? We can come to class an hour early, and finish an hour early so we could go.”

“Yes, yes!” the others cried, excited. “We’ve never been to a ritual!”

Uh-oh. These men and women were now looking to me, their teacher, to lead them into a public ritual and share the experience.

Gulp.

I’ve led many a ritual, public, private, you name it. I’ve attended many aritual, here, elsewhere. I teach a Designing Rituals class. The irony of it is that I’ve never actually attended a specific Montreal Pagan community open public ritual.

So off we went yesterday, the first time for everyone. And it was a wonderful experience. I was unaware, and subsequently delighted to discover, that one of my past students was playing a key part in the ritual (her first such performance), and I was bursting with pride for her. My current students were nervous, but they enjoyed themselves immensely – so much, in fact, that I think we’ll start making this a regular outing.

I must also extend a huge thank-you to the core people who were involved in producing yesterday’s ritual, especially my personal friends. Your efforts were truly appreciated. So was the welcoming attitude displayed by those same people who had been in the community way back when I first sent out tentative feelers, about seven years ago. They recognised me, and they welcomed me. I’m not quite sure what I expected; after rebuff and nasty comments in general from the community for the projects I was involved in, I was a bit timid. All fears have been allayed, now, however.

So you see, yesterday was quite the series of achievements.

And then I wrote a few NaNoWriMo pages, and we had dinner, and we watched some old Muppet Show episodes, and we went to another Hallowe’en party. So all in all, it was a pretty amazing day. Except for the fact that Buffy was a repeat already, alas…

5,312 words.

One-tenth of the way there. Twenty pages. Five hours. A chapter and a bit.

I’m fairly certain that there’s no way I can keep this up, as easy as this seemed. It’s too good to be true.

Yawn. Good night.

(Ssssh� don�t look now� but it�s snowing.)

It�s November. Start your engines! Let’s see… 50,000 words divided by thirty days is 1,667 words per day, or approximately 6 double-spaced pages, or 3 1/2 single-spaced pages. Ha! My problem as I lay awake last night was that I couldn’t remember of it was six single-spaced pages, or double-spaced. I’m fine. Three to four single-spaced pages daily? That’s a slow day for me. I am feeling much more confident about this project now.

I forgot to say �white rabbits� this morning, so heaven only knows what I�ve done to myself. Good thing I�m not a superstitious person.

Last night�s live TV studio performance of The True Story of Dracula on COGECO 13 in Kingston by the Midnight Players went brilliantly, if I may say so myself. I saw the opening prologue, which is just me doing a trance-like monologue with our eerie violinist and smoke from the smoke machine, and it was fantastic. In fact, I have been informed that if we ever do a Buffy thing for fun, I get to play Drusilla. Yep, spooky and trance-like; I’ve got it down pat. We have all been promised copies of this tape within the next two weeks, and I can�t wait to see the rest of it. I did have the fortune to catch a bit of JDH�s interview in his folklorist persona, which comes right after my trance prologue, and he looks slightly crazed and very intense as he talks about Vlad. His use of his hands in the clip was fantastic, and those shadows created by the lighting from beneath� brr! I saw it live, but seeing it on tape is a completely different cauldron of apples.

It was an odd experience, actually. I�ve done live theatre; I�ve done film work; I�ve live done radio work. This was a strange amalgamation of the three, and at times it was hard to figure out where to aim: Am I acting? Am I reading a script? How much am I allowed to move? Where do I look? Evidently I did just fine. I looked fantastic, I sounded fantastic, and if they ask us back for a Christmas special, I�m there! (With a few differences � like times get confirmed with us, and we know weeks in advance that we need to come up with our own costumes, and so forth…)

Well, it’s the big day itself. End of the witch-year.

See, the ancient Celts only recognised two seasons, Summer and Winter. Winter begins at sundown on October 31st. Summer begins at sundown on April 30th. This is why Hallowe’en – or Samhain – is a big thing in Pagan paths associated in any way with British tradition. (The other festival is Beltaine, or May Day, and it’s the other really big one – Maypoles, flowers, up before dawn, all that kind of thing. Samhain’s about death; Beltaine’s about life. Two essential sides of the coin. Enough about Belatine, we’ll talk about that in six months.)

As I have done previously, here’s my article on what Samhain’s all about. (I’m a writer and an educator, of coutrse I have articles on these things.) I meant to post the articles for each Sabbat – there’s eight in all – as the days arrived, but with one thing and another, well, life gets in the way. Samhain’s about clearing out the deadwood in your life and letting old things go, so maybe after this weekend I’ll be a little more focused. Who knows?

Anywhats. Article ho!

Samhain, also called Hallowe’en, All Soul’s Day, and Saveen, is celebrated on October 31, although the precise date varies year to year; in actuality Samhian arrives when the Sun reaches 15 degrees into Scorpio, which this year lands on November 8th. This festival is the end of what is called the modern Wheel of the Year. As the seasonal year is a circular cycle, this festival is also the beginning, as all ends hold within them the promise of a new birth.

Samhain is a festival which honours the dead. There is great emphasis placed on history and tradition in modern Paganism, and the ritual recognition of ancestors at Samhain is of great importance. As at Beltaine on the first of May, the veils between the worlds thin, which is to say that the otherworld or spirit realm seems much closer to us, allowing us to communicate with those beyond the veil, by offering them heartfelt good wishes and love.

However, Samhain is not a time to fool around with spirit boards, or to go roaming through cemeteries. Rather, it is a festival which allows us to examine our lives and say goodbye to those projects and people who are no longer with us for whatever reason, allowing them (and ourselves) to truly move on as we relinquish whatever grip we held upon them for various reasons – out of love, fear, or anger, for example. In the mythological cycle surrounding the Wheel of the Year, this is the time when the God descends to the Underworld, having been sacrificed along with the grain of the crops. The Goddess is in her Crone aspect, the Veiled Lady who gathers the dead to her bosom, She who holds the scythe and the knife.

Seasonally, this festival marked the beginning of Winter for the ancient Celts, who recognised only two seasons (Summer, of course, begins on Beltane). It is the third and final harvest festival, and marks the time of quiet and reflection that will occupy our minds and hearts until Yule, or Midwinter, when the God will once again be reborn, the Sun will begin to strengthen once more, and we will begin to plan our coming seasons.

Samhain is a festival that our modern society has truly grasped and brought into the mainstream. Dressing up in costume echoes folk practice of disguising children so that malicious spirits will be fooled into thinking they too are abroad to create mischief among men. Carving jack o’lanterns descends from either the practice of keeping a lantern in the window to guide the spirits of ancestors back to the bosom of their family for the night, or the practice of creating glowing maleficent faces to convince the evil spirits that the house had already been targeted by one of their brethren.

As this Sabbat revolves around ancestors, it is a festival that usually involves much storytelling. Some families perform a Dumb Supper: they lay a place at the table for those who have passed over, and serve them a portion of their meal. The meal is eaten in silence, allowing each family member to receive whatever impressions or message from the other side that the ancestors wish to communicate.

Main Samhain Concepts: the final harvest; altar decorations of apples; cauldron used as symbol of rebirth and transformation; honouring ancestors; night of divination; recognition of the essential presence of death within the life cycle.

A blessed Samhain from everyone at the Owlyblog!

Well! Time alone and then a salmon filet with a huge bowl of mussels while watching the last third of Shakespeare in Love can do wonders for the soul.

Today is the live performance of The True Story of Dracula at a Kingston TV studio. The thought of a three-hour drive there, a five-hour work day, then another three-hour drive back makes me want to wince in pain and weariness right now. It will be fun while we’re actually doing the show, between eight and nine o’clock, but everything else will be waiting, waiting, waiting, quick production meeting, waiting, a camera test, waiting, a run-through that will take fifteen minutes, waiting, waiting, waiting….

We were up early this morning, so we went out to pick up the paint for the kitchen. We’ve been talking about painting the lower half of the walls ever since we moved in, and now we finally have the paint: Tree Garden, a lovely sage green-ish colour. Knowing my husband, he’ll want to do a wall or two before we go. He claims painting is relaxing.

We also picked up a rag roller and chose a couple of paint chips in warm creamy colours (Starlet and Country Cream – they’re so darned close that we’re still trying to make a final-final choice) for the bedroom, which has been sterile and cold landlord-white for the past eighteen months. I’m fascinated by different finishes, and the ragging finish intrigues me with its subtle marbled effect. We’ll buy the paint in another two weeks or so.

See? Fall hits and we go all nesty. Since we can’t move any more furniture around, or acquire more kittens or baby creatures of any kind, we end up painting the walls.

Dark. Dark early.

Must hibernate.